


A Study In Puffball

by Omorka



Category: The Monkees (TV)
Genre: Community: comment_fic, Gen, Mad Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 15:57:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/915146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A moment of mad science at the Pad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Study In Puffball

The noise from the garage was not the usual violent explosion, but it still shook the whole Pad.

Mike set down his twelve-string and ran a hand over his face. "Okay, guys, what just went bang?"

"It was more a 'whoomph' than a bang," Peter observed.

Davy trotted over to the door. "It came from out here," he announced, bouncing on his toes to see out the peephole. "And there's smoke."

"How much smoke?" asked Mike, his legs eating the distance from the bandstand to the door in a few strides.

"Well, quite a bit, actually," Davy started, but he was interrupted by Mike yanking the door open. A wall of acrid white fumes rolled into the Pad, obscuring everything and sending all three of them into coughing fits.

Peter blindly groped through the haze; his fingers closed around one narrow wrist. "Davy?" he whimpered.

"No, man, it's me," Mike squeezed out between gasps. "Davy, where -"

A smaller hand closed on Peter's shoulder. "I'm here, guys," he wheezed.

Peter relaxed. "Okay, that's all of us, except -"

" _Micky!_ " they shouted together. They darted for the doorway three abreast; by the time they'd managed to squeeze through, the smoke was starting to dissipate. The garage door loomed open, a few wisps of something darker and greasier drifting through it.

Mike waved away the smog. The Monkeemobile was in the driveway, and looked intact enough; it couldn't have been the source of the explosion. That was a relief. "Micky?" he called.

Davy's head popped around the corner of the garage. "Uh-oh," he murmured, pointing.

Mike and Peter followed his finger. Micky's much-battered lab bench was on its side again; a narrow leg shifted under it.

"Oh, for - _Micky!_ " Mike and Davy darted past the Jeep and three broken lawn mowers in various states of disassembly to the bench.

Micky coughed once and groaned. "Careful, guys," he warned. "There was a beaker and about six test tubes on this thing when it went over."

Mike grabbed one end, Davy maneuvered around the broken glass to the other, and they flipped the bench back to vertical. Peter helped Micky scramble to his feet; the remnants of what had been a lab coat were wrapped around his head.

"Look at this mess," Mike groused. "What were you trying to do, anyway?"

"I was trying to come up with a way to dye our clothes so that we could change their colors by flipping a switch," Micky groaned, trying to untangle the shredded lab coat from his goggles. "You know, instead of having to do a costume change, we just push a hidden button, and the shirts change from red to blue."

"With a chemistry set?" Davy looked skeptical.

"It wasn't perfected yet," Micky admitted. "Uh, Mike, this thing's stuck. Could you give me a hand?"

Mike sighed. "Peter, you hold him still," he ordered. Peter grabbed Micky around the waist; Mike grabbed the tangle of soot-stained white fabric and yanked.

"Whew! Thanks," Micky sighed, reaching for his hair to pat it back into place. He paused as Davy made a noise like a startled cat.

Peter's mouth dropped open. Mike didn't bother to close it; he was too busy biting his lip and trying not to giggle.

Micky boggled at them. "What now?"

Davy's face contorted; he managed to turn away before exploding into a fountain of laughter. Mike ducked his head, shaking with suppressed chuckles. Peter only stared harder.

Frantically, Micky searched for a mirror. "What? What happened? Am I a werewolf again?"

"N-no," Peter choked out. "It's just - Micky, it's so . . . pink."

"Pink?" Micky screeched, grabbing a spare hubcap from the wall behind him. Sure enough, his curly mop was the approximate color of a wad of bubble gum.

Mike wiped his eyes and swallowed another giggle. "Looks just like - cotton candy at the county fair -" he dissolved into another round of guffaws.

"Aw, _man_ ," Micky sighed. "I can't go onstage like this, guys. What am I gonna do?"

"You've still got the wig you wore for that party," Peter pointed out helpfully. "You can wear that."

"Or," Davy suggested, taking a deep breath and sobering himself, "we could get you some regular hair dye to get it back to brown."

"As long as it won't - heh - react with this stuff and - hee! - I dunno, fill the Pad with toxic fumes," Mike gasped between giggles.

"I'd have to see what's in it," Micky sighed. "Maybe if can I get the switch hooked up to my head, I can cycle through the color choices back to something that at least looks natural." He glanced down at the scorched mess scattered across the garage floor. "If I can get it working again."

"Tell you what," Mike said, finally getting control of his voice back, "I'll go look for the wig while you get this cleaned up, and then once you don't look like a big sticky rodeo snack, you can try more science."

"I'll get the broom," Peter agreed, and darted off.

Micky sighed and started picking up the parts of his apparatus that hadn't shattered in the explosion. "Does it really look that dumb?" he asked Davy, looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

"Yeah, it looks pretty stupid," Davy agreed. "Kind of like a circus clown. But really, I'm just glad you're all right; I was worried when I saw all the broken glass."

"Ah, here we go," Micky muttered, picking up something that looked like a van de Graf generator had mated with a switchbox. "Okay, I'm going to hold the leads to my head - when I say go, push the button."

"Now," Davy warned, "Mike said no more experiments until he got back." He took the device anyway.

"I really don't want to watch him laugh his boots off at me again," Micky admitted. He pressed the ends of the wires to his temples. "Hit it!"

"Okay," Davy said, "but you asked for it, okay?" He pressed the button.

Micky yelped and leapt three feet into the air as a spark jumped from wire to skin. He yanked the leads away. "Okay, how does it look now?"

"Well, the good news is, it's not pink anymore," Peter announced as he arrived with the broom and dustpan.

"I'm not sure that's an improvement, though," Davy admitted.

Micky peered at the hubcap again. His puffball hair was now grass green.

"This may take a while," he groaned.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for the prompt "Any, any, 'It's so . . . pink'," by matrixrefugee on the comment_fic community on LiveJournal, but it was too big to fit in a comment, so I'm posting it here instead.


End file.
